Welcome!
Welcome to my personal web page, which is devoted (for the most part) to Linguistics and my work as a linguist. I’m currently ABD at Stony Brook University, dissertating on the topic “Quantifier Scope and Prosodic Effects in Russian”.
The dissertation has two parts (which is ambitious, but more or less doable). My dissertation work at Stony Brook University, funded by the NFS dissertation improvement grant (Award #: BCS-0921856, PI Prof. John Bailyn), entitled “Quantifier Scope and Prosodic Effects in Russian”, allowed me to combine my interests in Experimental Phonology, Comparative Linguistics and the Syntax/Semantics interface. The theoretical part of the dissertation, now largely completed, investigates the syntax and semantics of Quantifier scope in Russian. In it I argue against the widely held view (due to Ionin 2001, 2002) that Russian is vastly different from scopally ambiguous languages such as English in not allowing inverse scope interpretation of quantificational sentences. Using a variety of syntactic and semantic tests I show that there is in fact striking similarity between Russian and English with respect to quantifier scope availability as well as with respect to the syntactic mechanisms for achieving ambiguity, Quantifier Raising. Having established the distribution of quantifier scope and properties of Quantifier Raising in Russian I then use insights from scope for establishing VP-internal argument structure of ditransitive verbs. In particular, I argue that scope facts that obtain in Russian ditransitives receive the most natural explanation under the Accusative-higher-than-Dative base-generated order of the two internal arguments (Larson 1988, 1990; Bailyn 1995, 2009; Madariaga 2008). The novel data on quantifier scope in Russian ditransitives have also allowed me to argue against a Superiority account of scope freezing (Bruening 2001), and propose an alternative account of scope freezing facts in ditransitives based on the principle of Scope Economy (Fox 2000) that, if correct, carries important implications for syntactic analyses of related phenomena in various other languages, such as English, Japanese, Ukrainian and German, to name a few.
In the experimental part of the dissertation, carried out in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2008 and in 2009 I completed 4 production studies and a comprehension study on the prosody of quantificational sentences in Russian. Previous research on prosody of various syntactic constructions (Fodor 2002, Kitagawa and Fodor 2003, Hirotani 2004) have led me to hypothesize that the (sometimes silent) prosody native Russian speakers impose on quantificational sentences may create the surface-scope bias that has lead to the view of Russian as a surface scope language. The results of the production studies strongly suggest that this may indeed be the case. Specifically, the inverse scope interpretation appears to be dispreferred when an intermediate phrase boundary (usually a H-) separates the quantificational subject and the predicate containing a quantificational object. The inverse scope interpretation is similarly biased against when speakers focus either the verb or the object phase (but not when they focus the subject phrase). I argue that such results can be naturally explained through a combination of processing and pragmatic principles. The focus facts can additionally be explained by invoking principles of prosody/syntax interface (Truckenbrodt 1999). The fact that the latter is entirely consistent with the processing and pragmatic accounts is taken to further support the proposed account. The preliminary results of the comprehension study seem to support the hypothesis that prosodic phasing can bias native Russian speakers against the inverse scope interpretation as well, although the statistical analysis of the data still needs to be completed.
The website is newish and so many of the categories are still empty, but they’ll be filling up as I go along. If you are interested in my research, please contact me and I’ll be happy to tell you more about it. If you are a native speaker of Russian, Ukrainian or Bulgarian (which I recently started working on) and would like to contribute to the important goal of advancing the cause of Linguistics, please email me, and I’ll pay you back by thanking you in a journal article :)
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